Bricole XML Session Server
Bricole XSS is a server application primarily intended for use together with the Macromedia Flash feature XMLSocket. XSS makes it easy to create server-side Java-based application that communicates with a Flash 5 movie through the use of a persistent TCP socket and XML. The module-oriented design of XSS lets developers extend its functionality to suit a rich number of applications. Javascript and database (JDBC) support makes it an ideal platform for rapid development of advanced client-server Flash applications.
XSS is free for non-commercial, educational and evaluation purposes. Commercial licensing is available on a per-server basis, and the fee is €250 (SEK 2500) (excluding VAT), and includes new versions up to (but not including) 2.0.
While the product still is in alpha stage, it is believed to be very stable. During the alpha development stages, we will refine the public APIs and make sure that getting started with XSS development will be easy and that the provided tools behave in a consistent way.
Release date: September 21, 2003
Bricole XSS 0.9 includes the following features:
The Database access module lets a user access an SQL database with no programming required. SQL queries are defined in a property file and executed using pre-defined XML-tags <db:executeQuery/> and <db:executeUpdate/>. Their results are returned to the client, transformed into XML using the meta-data provided by the JDBC driver.
New XML tags can be defined using Javascript, and the scripts have access to the same Java objects as regular Java modules. The Javascript files are dynamically loaded when they are put in the defined folder, and reloaded if changed.
A generic authentication module is included, allowing the user to define users and passwords in the XSS configuration file. The XSS authentication mechanism allows an authentication domain to be associated with a module, and will only let users authenticated to that domain access the modules protected by it. XSS provides both basic (plain text) authentication and a secure challenge-response MD5 method which effectively protects the password from eavesdropping. The AuthHandler module API makes it easy to provide new authentication sources such as SQL user databases.
A simple chat module is provided, supporting private and public messages, user listing and user details.